Quotes about women

The Woman-Soul leadeth us upward and on!

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The higher mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial male who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her character.

— Emma Goldman

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

— Germaine Greer

A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.

— Germaine Greer

Maybe I couldn't make it. Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky ass, a sexy voice. Maybe I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.

— Germaine Greer

A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can't. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn't believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She's a male construct, and she's afraid women will deconstruct her. She's afraid of everything, because she can't change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she's my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!

— Alexander Herzen

If it were not somewhat fanciful to suppose that every human excellence is presented, as it were, in one kind of being, we might believe that the whole treasure of morality and order is enshrined in the female character.

— Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless -- for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.

— Washington Irving

It is not women's fault if we are so tender. It is in the nature of the lives we live. And further, it would be a terrible catastrophe if men had to live men's lives and women's also. Which is precisely what has happened today -- to women.

— Selma James

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

— Samuel Johnson

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness -- her selfishness, in short -- is a reproach to the American way of life.

— Erica Jong

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

— Erica Jong

The real thinking of woman is pre-eminently practical and applied. It is something we describe as sound common sense, and is usually directed to what is close at hand and personal. In general, it can be said that feminine mentality manifests an undeveloped, childlike, or primitive character; instead of the thirst for knowledge, curiosity; instead of judgment, prejudice; instead of thinking, imagination or dreaming; instead of will, wishing. Where a man takes up objective problems, a woman contents herself with solving riddles; where he battles for knowledge and understanding, she contents herself with faith or superstition, or else she makes assumptions.

— Emma Jung

Women are natural guerrillas. Scheming, we nestle into the enemy's bed, avoiding open warfare, watching the options, playing the odds.

— Sally Kempton

Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!

— Milan Kundera

The common foible of women who have been handsome is to forget that they are no longer so.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.

— D. H. Lawrence

The chief thing about a woman -- who is much of a woman -- is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation -- none of them -- not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.

— D. H. Lawrence

Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is merely a good excuse not to play football.

— Fran Lebowitz

Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don't are ladies. This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word. Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn't put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a lesbian.

— Fran Lebowitz

Woman is the Nigger of the World.

— John Lennon

You don't know a woman until you have received a letter from her.

— Ada Leverson

But if God had wanted us to think just with our wombs, why did He give us a brain?

— Clare Boothe Luce

A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.

— Russell Lynes

I'm anal retentive. I'm a workaholic. I have insomnia. And I'm a control freak. That's why I'm not married. Who could stand me?

— Madonna

There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifery.

— Bernard Mandeville

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

— Harriet Martineau

The angel of the Family is Woman. Mother, wife, or sister, Woman is the caress of life, the soothing sweetness of affection shed over its toils, a reflection for the individual of the loving providence which watches over Humanity. In her there is treasure enough of consoling tenderness to allay every pain. Moreover for every one of us she is the initiator of the future. The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life; and love and faith create a desire for perfection and the power of reaching towards it step by step; create the future, in short, of which the living symbol is the child, link between us and the generations to come. Through her the Family, with its divine mystery of reproduction, points to Eternity.

— Giuseppe Mazzini

Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia. That is why we number so few geniuses among us. The wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.

— Phyllis Mcginley

To be successful, a woman has to be better at her job than a man.

— Golda Meir

I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.

— George Meredith

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?

— Kate Millet

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.

— Kate Millet

We are educated in the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason; if some few get above their nurses instructions, our knowledge must rest concealed and be as useless to the world as gold in the mine.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

— Iris Murdoch

If it weren't for women, men would still be wearing last week's socks.

— Cynthia Nelms

Women are considered deep -- why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.

— Anais Nin

If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.

— Aristotle Onassis

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

— Camille Paglia

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.

— Camille Paglia

Woman -- for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: Blind yourself, for I am blind.

— Luigi Pirandello

Most women have no characters at all.

— Alexander Pope

The individual woman is required a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.

— Jeannette Rankin

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

— Adrienne Rich

I buy women shoes and they use them to walk away from me.

— Mickey Rooney

Woman! The peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch, and the sinner his justification!

— Helen Rowland

For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.

— Bertrand Russell

Woman's destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her.

— Marquis De Sade

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.

— George Sand

Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.

— Becky Sharp

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

— George Bernard Shaw

There is a growing strength in women, but it's in the forehead, not in the forearm.

— Beverly Sills

The clich? that women, more consistently than men, turn inward for sustenance seems to mean, in practice, that women have richly defined the ways in which imagination creates possibility; possibility that society denies.

— Patricia Meyer Spacks

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

— Freya Stark

To behold her is an immediate check to loose behavior; to love her is a liberal education.

— Sir Richard Steele

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

— Gloria Steinem

Most women defend themselves. It is the female of the species -- it is the tigress and lioness in you -- which tends to defend when attacked.

— Margaret Thatcher

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

— Henry David Thoreau

I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

— Mark Twain

The mouth of a cannon is safer that the mouth of a woman scorned.

— Source Unknown

Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.

— Source Unknown

Women, despite the fact that nine out of ten of them go through life with a death-bed air either of snatching-the-last-moment or with martyr-resignation, do not die tomorrow -- or the next day. They have to live on to any one of many bitter ends.

— Source Unknown

A typical minority group stereotype -- woman as nigger -- if she knows her place (home), she is really a quite lovable, loving creature, happy and childlike.

— Naomi Weisstein

The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself, their buttocks arrogant in tight jeans, openly inviting, breasts falling free and shameless and feeling no apparent obligation to smile, look pleasant or keep their voices low. And how they live! Just look at them to know how! If a man doesn't bring them to orgasm, they look for another who does. If by mistake they fall pregnant, they abort by vacuum aspiration. If they don't like the food, they push the plate away. If the job doesn't suit them, they hand in their notice. They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.

— Fay Weldon

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.

— Orson Welles

Give us that grand word woman once again, and let's have done with lady; one's a term full of fine force, strong, beautiful, and firm, fit for the noblest use of tongue or pen; and one's a word for lackeys.

— Ella Wheeler Wilcox

We have now traced the history of women from Paradise to the nineteenth century and have heard nothing through the long roll of the ages but the clank of their fetters.

— Lady Jane Wilde

Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.

— Oscar Wilde

There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

— Oscar Wilde

The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.

— Oscar Wilde

You've got many refinements. I don't think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.

— Tennessee Williams

Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?

— Virginia Woolf

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

— Virginia Woolf

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

— Virginia Woolf

Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding.

— William Wycherley

To be born woman is to know -- although they do not speak of it at school -- women must labor to be beautiful.

— William Butler Yeats

To please a woman is to say 'please' to a woman...but at other times not.

— Michael Wakcher

Women have tiny uncertainties that would eventually overwhelm any calculation

— William Mocca

No man on earth comes before his mother. Tadj Abdelkader from "Between two

— Tadj Abelkader

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

— Virginia Woolf

I would like it if men had to partake in the same hormonal cycles to which we're subjected monthly. Maybe that's why men declare war - because they have a need to bleed on a regular basis.

— butler, brett

To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.

— Jane Austen

Women are as old as they feel and men are old when they lose their feelings.

— Mae West

The nearer society approaches to divine order, the less separation will there be in the characters, duties, and pursuits of men and women. Women will not become less gentle and graceful, but men will become more so. Women will not neglect the care and education of their children, but men will find themselves ennobled and refined by sharing those duties with them; and will receive, in return, co-operation and sympathy in the discharge of various other duties, now deemed inappropriate to women. The more women become rational companions, partners in business and in thought, as well as in affection and amusement, the more highly will men appreciate home.

— Lydia M. Child

A woman is like a teabag. You can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

— Nancy Pelosi

When women go wrong, men go right after them.

— Mae West

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

— Rebecca West